Seven Years in Tibet

In 1939, Heinrich Harrer was part of an Austrian mountaineering team attempting the north face of Nanga Parbat in British India when Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war. The team was interned in a British prisoner-of-war camp in Dehra Dun, from which Harrer and his companion Peter Aufschnaiter escaped in 1944 after multiple attempts. What followed was a twenty-one-month crossing of some of the highest and most hostile terrain on earth — the Himalayas in winter — on foot, with inadequate equipment and almost no food, until the two men finally reached Lhasa, the forbidden city at the heart of Tibet. Seven Years in Tibet, written after Harrer’s eventual return to Europe, is one of the few first-hand accounts of a world that would be destroyed within years of his departure.

The escape and crossing sequence — the first third of the book — is adventure writing of the highest order. Harrer and Aufschnaiter are not prepared for what they attempt; they succeed because they are stubborn, experienced mountaineers, and because they have no realistic alternative. The physical hardships are rendered with the matter-of-fact directness of a man who survived them rather than with the retrospective dramatisation of a writer constructing suspense. The cold, the hunger, the hostile terrain, the constant risk of detection and deportation — all are present as facts, not as occasions for heroism, which makes the heroism more apparent.

Reaching Lhasa in 1946, Harrer and Aufschnaiter found a city that had had almost no sustained contact with the West and no particular reason to want any. They were allowed to remain by a combination of good timing, useful skills, and a fortuitous introduction to the Tibetan aristocracy. Harrer’s most important connection was the young Dalai Lama, then in his early teens, who was intensely curious about the outside world and enlisted Harrer as a kind of tutor in Western science, geography, and technology. Their friendship — which lasted until the Chinese invasion forced the Dalai Lama’s flight in 1959 — is the emotional centre of the book, and Harrer renders the young man’s intelligence and warmth with evident affection.

The book’s historical significance is difficult to overstate. Harrer lived in Lhasa for five years, witnessed its social and religious life, and left just before the Chinese occupation that would systematically dismantle what he had seen. His account — supplemented by photographs and detailed observation of Tibetan customs, governance, and daily life — is among the most complete records of pre-invasion Tibet available. The discovery, decades after publication, that Harrer had been a member of the Nazi SS was a genuine complication to the book’s legacy, and he later acknowledged it without adequate explanation. Readers who choose to engage with the book despite this history will find it an irreplaceable document of a world that no longer exists.

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